Description

"The Demon King descends from his mountain domain to you, the First Samurai and your master. Defenceless against the Demon's magic, you succumb to his powers, leaving the your Master to fight the Demon King alone. Your master falls in combat, dying. But, with his last breath, he summons the Wizard Mage. The Demon King fearing defeat, escapes to the future. Tormented, the young samurai seeks the teachings of the Wizard Mage in the ways of magic. Boiled with revenge and armed with a magical sword, the young samurai follows the Demon King into the future and the unknown..."

The First Samurai is a platform action game very much similar to other platform games, but with a medieval oriental touch to it in addition to various unique features.

Arriving in the new unknown land, you are defenceless hence your fists and kicks. But as you journey forth, you'll find your trusty magical sword as well as throwing weapons such as knives and axes. With your martial art skills, your enemy best beware with those sudden moves that may prove fatal!

The First Samurai offers a wide array of weapons, special items and other objects. Combat is usually melee, either relying on your punch or kicks or using the magical sword to slash some pretty skillful blows in whatever direction possible.

Monsters are forever regenerating but food for health is plentiful. It actually takes an effort to be killed...

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Trivia

Cancelled remake

A revamped version was to be released for the Nintendo 64, with a 3D perspective aimed at exploration, similar to Tomb Raider and one-on-one fights geared towards Tekken. The game was ultimately cancelled.

C64 version

The Commodore 64 version was originally intended for the C64GS, a cartridge-based keyboardless console which was not successful. As Mev Dinc commented some years later "Commodore promised so much but delivered so little, there were many mistakes with the whole thing, compatibility with some games and the lack of decent software all helped its quick demise!". The game was instead adapted to be released on cassette and disk, but was delayed when Mirrorsoft folded shortly after the Amiga version was published. Once Vivid Image had reclaimed the rights to the game it was released by UbiSoft several months later.

Extras

Some game boxes came with a free color poster featuring an enlarged picture of a Samurai and the caption "the power of bushido will be yours..." followed by the company's logo and address.

References

SNES version

In the SNES version several pictures in the intro, a bloody sword on the title screen and burger/coke power ups in the later levels were removed. Additionally all human enemies were replaced with demons. A detailed list of changes can be found on schnittberichte.com (German).